Saying goodbye to Harrison won't be easy

Mar. 23, 2008

Dodgers manager Joe Torre has made a lot of moves in his careers as a baseball player and manager. He finally found some stability as manager of the Yankees for 12 years, but last fall it came time for Torre to make another move. / Steve Senne/The Associated Press

Written by

Sam Borden

Journal News columnist

Not all homes have four walls. Not all homes have a familiar roof or a wide driveway or a doorbell that plays music. Sometimes home is just a feeling, a group of people, a routine that somehow seems more comfortable than old leather. Sometimes home is just a man in a Scooby-Doo costume walking around the neighborhood with his daughter.

Life offers little permanence, and professional baseball has always offered even less. It is the game that endures, not those within it, and movement is perpetual: From team to team, from city to city, from one end of the dugout to the other in search of an unopened bag of sunflower seeds or a fresh piece of gum. This is not a place for the static or complacent. Never has been.

Joe Torre, new manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, knows it, knows it as well as anyone because he spent five years in Milwaukee, three in Atlanta, six in St. Louis and three with the Mets during his playing career. Then four more as manager of the Mets, eight more back in Atlanta as a manager and then a broadcaster, and another six in St. Louis as a manager before finally, in 1996, returning to New York as manager of the Yankees.

Torre and his wife, Ali, rented a house in a private community in New Rochelle during that first season because Yankees owner George Steinbrenner - and most everyone who worked under him - suggested it was more prudent to rent instead of buy. Then the Yankees won the World Series, beating the Braves in six games and setting off a celebration that was fresh with emotion and exhilaration, the eruption of a franchise - and a man - reborn. Torre was so excited he drove home from the Stadium still in his uniform; Ali had prepared for the party earlier in the day, shrugging off any thoughts of jinxing the Yankees by ordering the bubbly ahead of time.

The house was big and the guests were countless, players and family and friends just showing up and staying until 6 the next morning. Many toasts were made; pizzas kept arriving, ordered by neighbors the Torres may or may not have actually known; the security guard at the front of the complex would say later that over 200 cars came by, most already aware they couldn't get past the gate but wanting, all the same, to be as close as possible to the glow of victory.

It was an unexpected bliss. There was a parade, more parties and, as much as one can get under Steinbrenner, some job security. Then in the summer of 1997, there was a new house in Harrison - bought, not rented - and when contractors pulled up the old floor in the dining room, they found a newspaper underneath from September 1978, with stories in it about how the Yankees were on their way to winning the World Series. Perfect.

Even then, it would have been nearly impossible to predict all that would follow, improbable to suggest that the Yankees would win three more titles and Torre would find the closest thing to stability he had ever known. That just didn't happen. Not for him and, really, not for most men who walk around with tiny rivers of pine tar and resin embedded in their hands.

It was a surprise, how it turned out, a surprise what Torre and his family uncovered in a slice of suburbia 20 miles north of Yankee Stadium. Twelve years later, the truth is this: Since saying goodbye to his family house in Brooklyn as a teenager, Torre - who will turn 68 this summer - had never lived in any one place longer than he lived in Westchester.

And now he is leaving.

Holiday traditions

It is Halloween night, 1998. The Yankees are, again, World Series champions, still lingering in the post-victory aura. The doorbell is ringing.

Ali answers the door and looks down at a group of young girls, maybe 13 years old. "Is Joe Torre heeeere? Can we have his autograph?" they say in that sort of drippy teenage-girl kind of way, and Ali smiles and shakes her head. She explains that she will give them plenty of candy, but the Torres have a house rule that Joe doesn't sign autographs at home. Write to the Stadium if you want, she says, and he'll mail an autograph back, but home is an autograph-free zone, if only because the Torre house is set close to the street. If autographs were available, the line would almost surely block traffic.

The girls accept this, take their candy, and leave. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rings again. Ali answers, and this time there are two boys on the tiny stoop. While they hold open their plastic bags, Ali sees them trying to peek around the door and peer inside, hoping for a glimpse of the large glass-fronted trophy case that sits on the right wall of the foyer, up next to a movie poster from "Analyze This," which features Torre's head on Robert De Niro's body and Billy Crystal sitting behind him, as if he were Torre's therapist. (Torre had a cameo in the sequel and Crystal, a good friend, had the poster made as a gift.)

After watching the boys dawdle on the porch, Ali says, "It's OK guys - you can come in and look at the trophy case if you want," and opens the door. The boys leap inside and peer up at the case, gawking at the World Series replicas on the top shelf. Lest anyone think there is only one successful athlete in the family, the second shelf is crowded with trophies from the Harrison Junior Soccer League and swimming ribbons won by 12-year-old daughter Andrea. There are a plethora of other awards Torre has won on the lower shelves.

The boys are transfixed by all the hardware, and their gazes are only broken when Torre picks this particular moment to walk by. "Hey guys, how you doing?" he calls out.

"Need an autograph?"

Telling the story while sitting in a comfy chair in the house's sunroom recently, Ali sighs. "So I said, 'Joe! What are you doing? I just told this car full of girls that you don't sign at home!' "

Ali laughs. "Literally, that night, it got around the neighborhood so fast that he was signing that people are trampling our garden trying to get into the door. So he signed autographs for like 2 1/2 hours, and then the following year I just had him sign cards ahead of time so I could pass them out."

Thing is, even that marathon signing session didn't dampen the evening. It couldn't. October is a special month for the Torres, and not because it is when the playoffs start. Oct. 1 means Halloween decoration shopping for Joe and Andrea, followed by pumpkin carving. On Halloween, Joe always takes Andrea out trick-or-treating.

A group from their street usually goes together, and the rules are thus: Joe isn't allowed to talk (to keep overzealous Yankees fans from recognizing him) and he must wear a costume that covers his body and face.

"Andrea loved Scooby-Doo at one point, so he got a costume," Ali says. "He's done the Grim Reaper, too. It's a big tradition for us. And I'll give the kids that come to our house hints about what Joe is dressed as, so they can try to find him in the neighborhood.

"It's a really special night for our whole street and it's a really special night for Andrea. It's her and Dad. It's just them."

Special places

This is what worried Torre as he mulled his future last winter. Taking the Dodgers job meant moving again, uprooting and starting over. Yes, he could take Andrea trick-or-treating in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or Hollywood, but it wouldn't be the same. It couldn't be, could it?

Sitting on a back field at Dodgertown one day earlier this month, Torre lets his leg dangle off the side of a golf cart and says, "This was the longest I ever stayed in one place for sure, and that wouldn't have been as much of an issue except for the fact that it's the only house my daughter ever knew." Then he says, "It was home."

Home is a complex concept for Torre, a man who grew up in a house where his father regularly hit his mother. There was also emotional abuse of Torre and his siblings. When it's suggested that perhaps those experiences made him more aware of the importance of a father's presence, Torre hesitates.

"Possibly," he says. "But maybe more that I realized I didn't have all the tools, that I didn't learn as much about being a father as other people did. I had to learn it as I went along. Most people maybe don't have to do that."

Torre was married twice, once in 1963 and once in 1968, and had two children before marrying Ali in 1987. It wasn't until 1995, though, after attending a life seminar with Ali, that Torre began to understand the damage he carried from his father's abuse. In 2002, he started the "Safe at Home" foundation (Ali is president), which aims to educate about domestic violence as well as offer havens for children in abusive situations. Those rooms, called "Margaret's Place" after Torre's mother, are operational in schools throughout the area, including several in Westchester.

"He struggled with his first two marriages, and he'll tell you that," Ali says. "He struggled with his adult children. He had to work very, very hard. I think it's wonderful that Joe did consider Andrea; it wasn't just about his career. And that's how a family should be."

What causes a family's roots to sink into a particular place though? Is it the idiosyncrasies, the personal touches?

The Torres have a massive backyard, with a trampoline in the far corner and a shallow pond in front that is surrounded by a fence and patio. On the patio are four chairs, which look very much like seats you would find in a baseball stadium.

Surely part of the roots are embedded in the time-worn habits, right? Those things you do so often you don't even have to look at the street signs on your way to do them?

Torre would often have his pregame lunch at Trattoria Vivolo in Harrison, a charming restaurant where the owner, Dean Vivolo, would make him an egg-white frittata or whole-wheat pasta with vegetables (he likes cherry tomatoes). If Torre was dining alone, he sat in a booth; if he was with Ali or Andrea or someone else, it was a table in the back.

"Most of the time people left him alone," Vivolo says. "There was one time, though, when some guy saw him through the window and came in and said he had just brought a cake to Joe's house. Joe didn't know who the guy was or what was going on, so it ended up that the cops were called because they were concerned it was like a bomb threat. It ended up being fine. I think he'd just delivered a gift."

Ultimately, though, it is probably the experiences that stick hardest, the memories that cling tightest: The championship celebrations. Torre's successful battle with prostate cancer. His 60th birthday party, held under a massive tent in the backyard. A heart transplant for his brother Frank. His own recovery from knee replacement surgery.

It all happened in this place, whether at this counter in the kitchen or this large dining room table or this open living room. Ali remembers coming downstairs on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It was Andrea's first day of kindergarten. Everyone was excited.

"We turned on the TV, because that's what we did while we were making coffee," Ali says, "and the first thing we saw was the second plane flying into the building. We all saw it. Andrea saw it."

It took nearly an hour before they found out that Ali's sister, Katie, a flight attendant for American Airlines, wasn't on one of the hijacked flights. Torre's son, Michael, worked on Wall Street, and he was safe as well.

"I just remember hearing the planes and the helicopters flying so low nearby, and running outside into the backyard to see if there was more," Ali says. "All I can remember thinking is, 'Are we at war?' "

The idea of leaving behind those idiosyncrasies, those habits and those memories is understandably daunting. What will the new life be like?

Will there be a good bagel place in Los Angeles? Will the drive to the park feel different? Will the postgame routine stay the same?

It all matters. For years, a night game meant a light midnight meal and glass of wine in the kitchen, followed by Torre winding down with the TV on as Ali tried to sleep. "We even bought a TV that had headsets attached, but I never used it," Torre says. "It just wasn't the same."

Family comes first

In the end, Ali encouraged her husband to take the Dodgers job. It was the best thing for the family, they decided, and Andrea will adjust. There are no plans to sell the Westchester home right away, but this also won't be a long-distance situation. After Andrea finishes school, she and Ali will join Torre in California. Ali says their daughter is interested in the performing arts, and the schools on the West Coast have great programs. "I think Andrea's actually getting more excited about it lately," Torre says.

It was a hard choice, made harder by what had come just before it. For the third straight year the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs, and for the third straight year, the Torres spent several weeks with media camped outside their house while the Yankees mulled their manager's future. This time - after receiving a one-year offer for less money than his previous contract - Torre walked away.

"After it happened the first time, OK, I understand," Ali says. "The media is camped out in front of your door, OK. It happened. They saw what happened. To let it happen again, and then again, though, I just felt like 'Where is your sense of empathy for us and what you're putting us through? ... You're preparing for next year before the World Series is even over in other facets of the operation of your team, so why do you let your leader hang out there?' "

The split was hard, and Ali says she believed her husband needed "to grieve" a little over the separation. But then came the Dodgers' offer; another chance and, now, another season.

Some things about Torre are the same in Dodgertown as they were in Tampa. His personal assistant, Chris Romanello, is still by his side and will move from New York to California; the Yankees' former bullpen catcher, Mike Borzello, is now with the Dodgers; pitchers Scott Proctor, Mike Myers and Tanyon Sturtze pitched for Torre in New York and now wear Dodgers colors. So does third-base coach Larry Bowa, as well as Don Mattingly (who was supposed to be the hitting coach but asked for a lesser role so he had time to deal with some family issues).

In some ways, Torre looks as comfortable as ever. The paper cup of green tea is still ubiquitous in his hand, and the stories about his contemporaries - Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax and Warren Spahn - continue to flow easily.

"Change is tough, there's no doubt," Torre says, still sitting on the golf cart in between two diamonds, "but all of a sudden, when you start doing your thing at the ballpark, there's a certain consistency in what you've done all your life. You know it well."

He smiles then, waves his hand at the ballplayers throwing and catching and running and hitting all around him. There is a new challenge ahead, a new opportunity. It is the building of a new home, and the formula is a good one for Joe Torre: There is Ali. There is Andrea. There is baseball.